Posts Tagged ‘Marriage’

The past week, I’ve been listening to a rather wonderful audiobook called East, a retelling of the Norwegian folktale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” by Edith Pattou, which is essentially the Nordic version of Beauty and the Beast. Essentially… well, okay. This needs its own separate paragraph.

Essentially, a young girl named Rose lives with her family in ancient Norway. Her sister Sarah becomes extremely sick and her family is going bankrupt when one night a white bear appears at the front door and offers to make the family prosperous again and to heal Sarah if Rose will come away with him. Despite her family’s protests, Rose goes with the white bear to Fransk, or France, to live in a huge castle within a mountain. Of course, she comes to love the white bear, and it’s very Beauty and the Beast, but very original and with lots of new twists. For instance, the man who had been turned into a white bear had been transformed by the Troll Queen who lived in the farthest reaches of the north with all of her troll subjects. The Troll Queen is very beautiful, powerful, and smart, and also very politically intelligent.

Even though I positively loved Rose for her spunk, ingenuity, and sturdiness of both body and mind, apparently the idea of the Troll Queen got pushed deep into my psyche because last night, I dreamed that I was something very much like her. I was beautiful, with long straight hair and always wearing lovely ball gowns. There was a prince who was visiting from another realm who had come with a delegation to my castle, and apparently a marriage between us was a desirable political move for my family.

So what did I do? Did my absolute best to make him fall in love with me, using feminine arts that in real life would have either been totally ridiculous or utterly impossible for my personality. For example: walking straight up to him, entwining my arms around his neck, and forcing him into a rather nice kiss.

(Here’s the funny thing about whenever I kiss someone in a dream… which, of course, is the only way I’m kissing anyone. Every time, I nearly immediately realize at that point that it is a dream—har, har—and then I find myself kissing… nothing. They disappear, whether it’s some nameless prince or Damon Salvatore or Doctor Who or, rather less than pleasantly, Ron Weasley. Last night, when I kissed the prince, I found myself kissing the curtains where I, uh, might have shoved him. Innocently. Very innocently.)

Later, I was talking to my nurse maid/advisor—another throwback to the Troll Queen, who had one of these nurse maid/advisor people—and she accused me of hunting him down like a vixen. Yeah, she used those words. My brain is insane.

“But I actually do like him, too,” I told her. This was true. He was shy and quiet and totally terrified of my advances. It was sort of fun.

Yep… you get two posts in one day. Aren’t you excited? Really this is because I am being a bad person and not using my time for more honorable uses… whatever. So shoot me. But actually don’t, because snarkhood actually forms a bulletproof shield between guns and the radiator of the snarkosity and fires the bullet back at the initial firer. So unless you want to die….

…. you don’t know what to do with lasagna when you take it out of the freezer. Should you have taken it out two hours ago to thaw? Is it safe to microwave? Will the ice on the lasagna do something crazy like explode when you put it in the microwave. (Dear Mr. Alexander Bell, thank you for inventing the telephone, which later led to the invention of the cell phone, which allowed me to call Mom and ask what I was supposed to do in this conundrum, and thank you Mom for telling me it would microwave fine, and that the ice wouldn’t explode after all.)

…. you spend fifteen minutes trying to open a can of English peas. Not only do you spend fifteen generally fruitless minutes in this pursuit, but you have also been equipped with a really handy Pampered Chef can-opener, and everyone who’s anyone knows that Pampered Chef is supposed to be sufficiently idiot-proof even for idiots of idiotic incredibleness such as I am, apparently. During this fifteen minutes, you manage to spill pea juice everywhere when a tiny slit (somehow) opens and spews everywhere, almost break the can-opener, cause several can-opener technological malfunctions (I didn’t know can-openers could malfunction, either), and only get the can open after resorting to digging your nails under the tiny incision you actually managed to make in the lid—and you break a few nails in the process, too, and your nails barely exist, anyway.

…. you stick the peas into the Tupperware container with the lid that lets the steam out, and although you followed the time-in-the-microwave instruction to the T (or rather, to the pea… hahahaha, oh boy… puns…), somehow within two minutes and thirty seconds (and it was supposed to be able to cook until three and a half minutes), the peas are bubbling up out of the steam hole and making an enormous mess. Then, assuming that the peas are hot enough to eat after you almost burned yourself on the steam after opening the lid, they’re just barely lukewarm.

…. even after half an hour of microwave-related insanity, you and your little brother both have to go back to the microwave to get the food to an edible temperature.

Sigh. I didn’t even know it was possible to be so horribly bad at cooking that you can’t even manage a microwave. Note to self: Be rich enough to hire a cook or to sponsor research into a cooking robot, which shouldn’t be too difficult since we’re moving further into the twenty-first century when everything from vacuuming to going to the bathroom will likely become automated.

…. Somehow, my fiancé, whoever he should be and whenever he may deign to come along, is going to have to remain totally oblivious to my impoverished culinary skills. Either that, or he’s going to have to be a heckuva chef, himself.

I painted one fingernail bright red, just to see what it feel like. It feels weird.

Oh… and I wanted to tell you all that I am sadly renouncing my claim on the Freaky Female Who Absolutely Cannot Cry No Matter How Bad She Wants To. Although I kind of liked the title and the uniqueness that it brought me, I’ll be honest… it’s been a little while since I’ve been able to claim it, so I’m officially revoking it. I’m sure that sounds borderline bad-bad-bad emo, but you have no idea how glad that makes me—crying, for girls, is like, I dunno, punching things and working out and being grouchy and not talking to people is for guys—it just makes you feel better.

What brings that up is… Mom told me today that my beloved dog, Merlin, is Getting Old. I’ve been on the verge of tears all day—not the old weird I’m-on-the-verge-of-tears-but-can’t-cry sort of on the verge, but the literal if-I-actually-wanted-to-cry-it-would-be-no-problem kind. I scratched him behind the ears for a really long time and then told him I wouldn’t give him another treat ever if he Got Old. I’m pretty sure he listened, or he perked up his ears when I told him this, anyways, which I take as his doggy sign of acquiescence. (Or maybe he was just reacting to the word “treat”….)

I’ve been listening to Taylor Swift for the past hour now. Gotta love it… or, okay Zane, you don’t have to, but on occasion it’s pretty awesome to have some packaged angsty, sing-along-able, estrogen-packed tunage to pass the time.